The Fight for $15 kicked off on November 29, 2012, with a fast food strike in New York City. On its fourth anniversary, workers and supporters were striking and rallying in airports and cities across the country, with civil disobedience arrests in New York and Los Angeles and dozens of protesters ticketed in Chicago. Uber drivers have joined the fight as well. And while congressional Republicans have kept the federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour through these four years, the fight has led to advances for millions of workers across the country.
Remember that when workers hit the streets demanding $15 an hour, the high-end goal Democrats were embracing was $10.10 an hour. It took serious activism to make anyone take $15 seriously, but the last four years have seen major progress, state by state and city by city, on raising the minimum wage. A new report from the National Employment Law Project shows how big the movement’s wins have been:
- Since the Fight for $15 launched in 2012, low-wage workers have won $61.5 billion in annual raises through a combination of state and local minimum wage increases together with action by employers to raise their companies’ minimum pay scales. This figure represents the total additional annual income workers will receive once these approved increases fully phase in.
- To put these wage gains in context, this $61.5 billion raise delivered by the Fight for $15 to workers in just a handful of states is more than 10 times larger than the total raise received by workers in all 50 states under Congress’s last federal minimum wage increase, approved in 2007.
- Of the $61.5 billion in additional income, 66 percent is the result of landmark $15 minimum wage laws that the Fight for $15 won in California, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, SeaTac and Washington, D.C. over the past few years.
The fight won’t be getting any easier in the next four years, to say the least. But it’s an important reminder that organizing works—and we’re going to need to cling to that thought and dig in if we’re going to have a chance at moving any direction but backward.